Chuck McCullagh's views from Manhattan on magazine and publishing technology.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

The Archetype of the Gun

I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I am surrounded by guns,
starting with my URL. I thought I was
clever coming up with www.magtech.org
because everyone would know the site referred to magazine technology. Except for those looking for www.magtech.com or www.magtechammunition.com to make
their next assault weapon or ammunition purchase.

A few weeks ago, The Journal News, a local newspaper, posted
a map on its web site that showed with digital teardrops the actual locations and
addresses of homes of those who had a permit to carry a handgun. This act was in response to the Newtown,
Conn., shooting and, however well-intentioned, had a blowback effect because
some permit holders had moved, given up their guns, or died. And it didn’t include rifles. So the newspaper squandered an opportunity. Nonetheless, it had a sobering effect on the
community. Has the guy down the block
who might have a gun been acting weird lately?

I’ve lived in the north Bronx and Brooklyn, New York, and
assumed that most people had a gun or a knife and acted according. I’ve had guns pulled on me while on business
travel to Mexico and Romania. But I’ve
had good gun instructors from an early age. As a detective, my father carried a gun and
taught his three sons gun safety. My brother-in-law, a US Army veteran who saw
vicious fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and earned a Purple Heart, taught
me to shoot skeet along the Ohio River. I
purchased my first gun, a 12-gauge shotgun from Sears, for small game hunting. While
in the Navy, I fired everything I could get my hands on, including deck guns. My father-in-law taught me how to hunt deer
using a 12-gauge shotgun and “pumpkin balls” or lead slugs good within a
hundred yards. I will always remember
him for emphasizing the “sport” in sportsman. In this spirit, I took up hunting with bow and
arrow.

I gave up my last gun, used to keep down the groundhog population,
when I moved off a farm in Pennsylvania more than a decade ago. So I’m quite comfortable, digital gun mapping aside,
around guns. But why are we Americans so uncomfortable
talking about guns and about placing certain restrictions on assault weapons
and size of magazines? The murders of
the children and teachers in Newtown, Conn., have become an all-too-familiar
narrative, bookmarked by the media. Sadness, horror and outrage are followed by
political vows that this time things will be different and something will be
done. In the meantime, the NRA vows that
nothing will change and waits for the Connecticut effect to “blow over.” The organization knows that it has time and much
of the Congress on its side.

I was working in England at the time of the Dunblane,
Scotland, massacre, in which 16 children and a teacher were murdered by a man
carrying four handguns and 743 cartridges.
It was widely reported that the shooter was a pedophile and deeply
troubled by being booted out of the Boy Scouts. The outrage in the UK lasted more than a few
news cycles. The outrage lasted. Period. I recall the punk rock band UK Subs, releasing
their “Dunblane” single with the lyrics: “After Dunblane, how can you hold a
gun and say you’re innocent.” This guilt-by-association and similar effects
worked. By 1997, the UK had outlawed all
handguns, with some exceptions.

Of course, the US is not the UK. We have a Constitution and the Bill of Rights,
including the Second Amendment that gives the people the right to keep and bear
arms. A common sense approach to gun
restriction would be to state the obvious. No right is absolute. We can’t yell “fire” in a crowded
theater. Why the absolutism when it
comes to gun control? The answer to this
question won’t come from the hacks, pundits or the fringe. The answer must come from psychology and the
gods of mythology, all of whom are well-armed.

As a veteran, a media crank, and a student of psychology I
keep the book, A Terrible Love of War
by psychologist James Hillman close at hand because the author utters the
unthinkable and rarely stated thesis: that America and most of the world loves
war; that war is constant throughout history and ubiquitous around the globe;
and war is considered normal and acceptable. Hillman reminds us of Martin Luther King Jr.’s
words: “The greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today … is my own Nation.”

To make his point, Hillman notes there have been 16,000 wars
of consequence during the last 5,000 years, more or less. The author would ask us to re-read The Iliad and get to know the Greek God
of war, Ares, and his more familiar Roman cousin, Mars, and the myths and
legends around these gods to better understand that “the spirit of war and the
rage of battle are archetypal, forced upon all animal life, all gender and all
societies.” War is indeed inhuman, but it is also sublime. In the film Patton, the general tells a
soldier how much he loves war, more than life itself. The myths tell us that Mars, no matter how
much of a bastard he was, was never far from Venus.

Hillman walks among the mythical figures as if they were
next-door neighbors. But his interest is
in psychology, not story-telling. He
reminds us, often, that “Myths provide archetypal ways of insighting the human
condition; they present psychological truth such as we discover when turning to
war with Mars/Ares in the background of our minds.” Myths “ask the psyche to invent and speculate;
to listen and be amused; religion, first of all, calls for belief.”

So what about guns in this psychological tableau? The author takes us on an excursion to Japan
which had gun control from 1543 to 1879. The Portuguese introduced guns to Japan and
that nation, already skilled at metallurgy, quickly became expert gunsmiths,
improving the products in fundamental ways.
Then the country turned away from guns until Commodore Perry arrived in
1853. Hillman suggests a number of
reasons for this. The skill of
engagement moved from soldier to manufacturer; the warrior class didn’t want
peasants getting the gun; Japan had no external gun enemies. The gun was an “outside” idea. For the author, more to the point is that “The
cult of the sword was ancestral, symbolic, and religious—and also aesthetic.” The sword was associated with elegant
movement. The gun required award kneeling positions.

Hillman sees aesthetics as one possible solution or way out;
the more beauty, the less violence. He
writes that, during the European Age of Enlightenment, there was a dis-taste
for bloodshed and a reluctance to kill fellow Europeans. Serious thinkers, including Thomas Paine,
Voltaire, Swift, Samuel Johnson and many more advanced “a kind of guerrilla
warfare against the cant and hypocrisy that form the fabric of nationalistic
patriotism, sentimental personalism, and light-hearted religiosity so signal to
our times.”

He adds that the idea that “culture restrains war is being
proven in reverse. Along with the
American state’s promotion of bellicose militarism, it withdraws from the arts.
The impoverishment is furthered by
debasing the language, neglecting education beyond occupational training, and
narrowing the rich complexity of religious studies to one’s own favorite
brand.”

At a recent NRA convention of Wausau, Wisconsin, The Reality News, not specifically tied
to the gun lobby, published an article, “What Would Davy Crockett Say?” The newspaper calls for Secession and a Combo
Civil/Re-Revolutionary War and pushed this cant to the extreme.

This kind of rhetoric makes Hillman’s point. In A
Terrible Love of War, he argues that we need new myths and a heightened
sense of aesthetics to explain our love of war and guns. America’s love of guns is certainly tied to
the frontier myth and the fantasy we have about taking things into our own
hands. American literature has a long
tradition of the male antagonist as outsider, on-the-run, or in combat, anything
to avoid “civilization” and the embrace of the feminine. It is this simple archetype of nostalgia,
co-opted by politicians and cause marketers, that asks “What would Davy
Crockett Say?,” sounding very much like the Disney version but deadly as
gunfire in its primitive, inelegant, and dime novel chant.

Hillman is too complicated and rich for summary. He’s best read in the original. He acknowledges that the pen is not mightier
than the sword, that the expression is a writer’s delusion. But he continues, in this book and others, to
take us back to the eighteenth century and the Age of Enlightenment “when
orthodox faith was giving way to freethinking,” suggesting aesthetic passions
restrain war. He writes that “all the
arts and sciences, and the intimacies of talk, letters and diaries, are lived
on slowness and its pleasures.” By this,
Hillman means the “slow aesthetics of workshop, studio, husbandry, garden, and
laboratory, taming haste but not its passion. Venus ‘victrix’ still wants to win and conquer
the task at hand. Aesthetic intensity
draws Mars onto a parallel path.”

Less than one percent of Americans serve in the military. A handful in government set military policy
and send us to war. Most of this is done
in secret. Organized religion,
especially Christianity, offers no real counter. Mars is well represented. We need more of Venus in the dialogue; more of
the feminine. Today, the conversation about guns is narrow and metallic, made intentionally
circular and hollow by the convening parties. We need more artists, poets, scientists,
philosophers in this circle of fire. Hillman
asks us to imagine a “nation whose first line of defense is each citizen’s
aesthetic investment in some cultural form.”
Might war lose some of its magic?
The author suggests that “aesthetic passion provides multiple fields for
engagements with the inhuman and sublime certainly less catastrophic than the
fields of battle.”

Until we get our heads around the notion that the gun, and
the way it is worshiped in America, is an archetype and therefore a god, gun
control, however useful, is a legalistic enterprise. We should be far more interested in what Venus
or Aphrodite has to say on this matter than the “king of the wild frontier”
musing about the Alamo.